VMware has given the first demonstration of its mobile virtualization solution …

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At this week's VMworld Europe 2009 conference in Cannes, VMware execs took the stage to demonstrate how the company's mobile hypervisor technology can let users run Windows CE 6.0 and Android on the same mobile device. In this case, the device was a Nokia N800 internet tablet, and it took advantage of the company's Mobile Virtualization Platform (MVP), announced in early November, to squeeze the two competing mobile OSes onto the same ARM-based device.

UK-based IT PRO Magazine was there and captured some video of the device in action, and from a performance perspective the OSes look usable but not exactly spectacular. My guess is that a combination of software tweaking and better hardware would turn this from a single into a triple, and possibly even a home run.

Virtualization.info and WindowsForDevices.com have more on-site coverage of the Wednesday keynote where the demo was first unveiled, and they reveal that the VM images are less than 40MB each, and the bare-metal MVP hypervisor is a slim 20K.

As storage availability, processor speed, and memory bandwidth all increase on mobile devices, virtualization becomes more and more feasible. This is especially true when it comes to hypervisors, which sit between the hardware and the OS, and don't impose the overhead of a host OS/VM/guest OS model. I would guess that by the end of this year something like MVP—or an alternative from a company like VirtualLogix—will give a serviceable user experience for virtualized mobile OSes, depending on the demands of the guest OS and the robustness of the underlying hardware. If ARM is more amenable to classical virtualization approaches than x86 (I don't know for sure if it's Popek and Goldberg compliant, or how hard it would be to make it so), then a hypervisor could be done with less overhead than on x86.

At any rate, virtualization on mobiles will really start to get interesting in the 2010-11 timeframe, when mobile processor power in both ARM and x86 camps will have increased enough to lessen the relative impact of the technique's overhead on performance and battery life. At that point, the full benefits of virtualization in mobiles will be apparent, and I expect that both device makers and end-users will jump on it.

The case for mobile virtualization

In today's world, when a company like Nokia brings to market a new phone, that phone is a "Windows Mobile" phone, or an Android phone, or a Symbian phone, etc. The underlying hardware might be able to support any number of mobile OSes, but Nokia (or whoever) has to pick a single OS to tie that hardware to for the life of the product. But if Nokia has a hypervisor that can run a variety of OS options on the same hardware, then the company can easily offer a handset with more than one OS option. Indeed, the mix of OS versions can be trivially adjusted on a store-by-store basis by just shipping phones to stores and having the salesperson load the OS image onto the phone at the point of sale.

So from a carrier and mobile handset manufacturer's perspective, virtualization will increase mobile OS competition and lower the up-front risk of betting on an OS, all while giving carriers more flexibility to manage their product mix on-demand.

Mobile virtualization also benefits consumers, too. I love VMware's idea of using virtualization to enable multiple personas on a single phone—a work persona would have one combination of data and applications, while a personal persona might have a different combination. Users would be able to switch personas on the fly, in response to incoming calls or messages. This kind of identity management is key in navigating many of the challenges of IT consumerization, and will help ease the burden on IT departments of supporting "consumer" mobiles in the enterprise.